tales from the code face

In my previous post I described John Conway’s Game of Life as a hello world for computer graphics. Actually, it goes beyond that. Hello world is a complete program, a proof the toolchain works, but it’s not a particularly interesting program. An implementation of the game of life does more than demonstrate you can put pixels on screens: the evolution of those pixel colonies turns out to be a subject worth studying in itself.

That said, I’m primarily interested in Life as an exercise in learning new things. I’ve continued to develop my canvas implementation, adding some jQuery UI effects. The code is on Github — yes, it’s high time I learned about that too — though note there are dependencies on jQuery, jQuery UI, Imagemagick, and on pattern files downloaded from conwaylife.com.

A working version can be found at wordaligned.org/life. Click the graphic below to give it a go. Your web client does support HTML5 Canvas, right?